This is my first play of this scenario. I ended the game with one rebel and therefore silver place.

The scenario lasts 10 turns essentially, and the victory conditions are tight. My strategy at the outset was to do my best not to have a wasted exploration; with no other players to bail me out and only 3 actions per turn at the beginning, every move counted. I built an extra ship early on to help achieve that end. Luckily, the evolution cards Peace and Prosperity and Archbishop came out early on, they match perfectly with the victory conditions. So I concentrated on building temples to make the best use of the Archbishop, eventually I ended up with 5; of course they also helped with rebel citizens during the game. Stone supplying regions were preferred (Quarry also became available)! The only other building I constructed was a market. This helped me dabble in the domestic market to get just sufficient florins for a card each turn and card activations. The domestic stone market was the only market, domestic or export, to figure in the Population Effects phase. There was no taxation.

Migration as an action got chosen once, maybe twice in the 32/35* action game. Not having played a proper multiplayer game I can only speculate as to how it might gain in relevance therein. Besides, the False Prophet was on hand, and it helped me shift a citizen out of a temple-containing region in order to use it to build a temple in the adjacent region, respecting the 1 building type per region rule.

Indeed, card effects allowed for nifty short-cuts/solutions speeding-up the tempo of play, stretching-out the action discs in a turn. For instance I also had Missionary which gives an 'insta-citizen' in place of an explored hut. And playing solo I always had access to all the cards!

I explored successfully 9 times, it helps to get that extra action disc after 8 tile lays. My population ended at 10 meaning I never had to break out another player colour, and the surplus workers topped out at 13 or 14. I had 1 hairy turn in the 10 where the rebels were 1 behind the population, I guess I pushed my luck midway through but got away with the card draw and what was available in terms of resources in the markets to resolve the crises. Apart from that I'd call my progress through the game comfortable.

Good question. I was using Archbishop and/or Peace and Prosperity every turn. Also, if I were harvesting I'd usually activate a X2 resource card if I had it; a proportion of the cards are tied to particular actions. Sometimes I bought a card that wasn't that useful, because it was cheap and I didn't have many florins. So overall no struggling over which to use in this particular play through. In a scenario I just finished (probably the longest as its end condition is to explore the whole archipelago) I had to give more thought to which cards to play and in what order.